Gerfried Fuchs announced an upcoming Debian WWW Sprint [6] to finalise
the last bits that are needed to get the new design for the website
happening. The sprint will happen on the weekend of December 17 to 19 in
Vienna, Austria. People interested in attending with a somewhat firm
knowledge of CSS are welcome to get in contact as soon as possible. A
preliminary agenda [7] for the meeting is available.

Robert Millan is pleased to announce that the last missing patch for ZFS
support has been added [8]to the official Installer. This updates the
already existing ZFS integration into the Debian Installer [10] we
relayed less than two months ago [11].

This means that Debian “Squeeze” will be one of the first GNU
distributions to support ZFS.

Raphaël Hertzog published an interview with long-time Debian Developer
Colin Watson [12], who has been taking care of man-db for more than ten
years. He has done a lot of work on the debian-installer [13],
especially the partitioner, and plans to design a new interface to
handle disk naming consistently for “Wheezy” . He also works on GRUB 2,
which may be the best opportunity to “reduce the need for the current
mass of boot loaders” . Colin Watson also provides information about
Ubuntu and what persons he admires most among Debian developers.

Since the last issue of the Debian Project News, two new issues of the
[14] “This week in Debian” podcast have been published: with Lars
Wirzenius [15], author of Debian’s Upstream Guide and member of the
Front Desk project; and with Jeremiah Foster [16], discussing Maemo and
Debian derivatives.

Petter Reinholdtsen produced some statistics of distribution usage [18]
from almost 100,000 computers registered with popularity-contest [19]:
more than 60% of them are running “Lenny” , the current stable release.

Paul Wise sent an update about the Debian derivatives front desk [20],
reporting about what has already been achieved, and sharing thoughts
about what could be done in the future. He proposes quarterly
derivatives meeting on IRC and annual face-to-face meetings at DebConf,
and also invites updates of the census of Debian derivatives [21].

According to the Bugs Search interface of the Ultimate Debian Database
[25], the upcoming release, Debian 6.0 “Squeeze” , is currently
affected by 246 release-critical bugs. Ignoring bugs which are easily
solved or on the way to being solved, roughly speaking, about 79
release-critical bugs remain to be solved for the release to happen.

Please note that these are a selection of the more important security
advisories of the last weeks. If you need to be kept up to date about
security advisories released by the Debian Security Team, please
subscribe to the security mailing list [37] (and the separate backports
list [38] and volatile list [39]) for announcements.

Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer
writers to watch the Debian community and report about what is going on.
Please see the contributing page [55] to find out how to help. We’re
looking forward to receiving your mail atdebian-publicity@lists.debian.org [56].